I first woke when the growth fluid drained from my vat. I had no language and many strange sensations—air against my transparent skin, the murmurs of the vat techs, beeping machinery noises, a sense of cold and the loss of the engulfing warmth of the vat fluid, the touch of gloved hands as the techs gripped my shoulders and sat me up. I opened my eyes to a confusing welter of colors and darks, things I didn’t yet know were faces aimed toward me as the people behind them talked in low tones.
I was born as an anatomy model for science classes, with a simple governor implant that made me obey any order given by professors and students, once they downloaded language into my brain. I could understand, but I could not speak.
As a constructed person, I learned how I was different from legal people by observing the professors and students and building caretakers in my classroom those times when I was awake and aware, not shut down in my sustaining medbed. Legal people did not have clear skin that revealed the workings inside them. Legal people did not have openings in their torso and back that allowed others to remove and examine organs, strum muscles, stroke bones, and reassemble them afterward. Legal people did not have extra-long attachments to their internal parts that allowed removal while still attached, and kept everything working.
I learned how I was similar to legal people from Melina, a student who could hack building codes and security systems and sneak into the classroom after hours. She opened my medbed and ordered me out of it, interrupting my maintenance cycle. She stroked my skin and gently pulled me apart, running parts of me against her bare skin. Sometimes she disassembled me a lot, more than other students or professors ever had, but she never broke any parts of me until the last time. She always put me back together correctly.
She gave me orders I had to learn, as they were not in my dataset. She told me to move, to touch and embrace her and place parts of me inside parts of her, and to make motions.
Ultimately, she stole my heart.
That killed my first iteration.
She left me in my medbed, which managed to sustain most of me. My neurological core survived, and it was built to be recycled. I was not the first anatomy model a student had killed.
For my second iteration, I was reborn with normal skin and fewer openings. I lost my human teeth so I couldn’t bite the legal people pushing breath into my mouth. I drowned in a bathtub over and over, and the students pushed water out of me and air into me, and I did not die.
Melina found me again. She came to the classroom where students worked to learn from my repeated near-deaths how to save other legal people. She came after hours and accessed my identity tag, which was the same as it had been in my first iteration.
Again, she removed my heart. She was starting a collection, she said. She loved my genome.
For my third iteration, the university mech-doc fitted me with muscle strength augments and a lockjaw so I would be a guard. Now I had titanium teeth I could bite intruders with to restrain them. My incisors carried sedatives. My molars could inject other things. My teeth were sharp, and my grip was inescapable.
My new job did not involve interacting with legal people. I prowled the science building at night, receiving data from all the security systems, scanning for illegal people, to whom I could actually do things without outside orders: The rules of being me had changed.
Melina wove her way through the systems to find me, even though I looked nothing like either of my previous selves. I still had the same identity tag. She bypassed the security systems by pretending to be a constructed person who belonged in the building, one who could go in and out to restock supplies and clean places where legal people had left messes.
She was waiting in the anatomy classroom where we had first encountered each other. She said she owned me, and she was ready to harvest another of my hearts.
Since she was now an illegal person, I bit her. And I stole her heart.
About the author:
Over the past four decades, Nebula and Stoker Award-winning writer Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and young adult novels and more than 400 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Nina teaches writing through Fairfield County Writers’ Studio and Wordcrafters in Eugene. She lives in Oregon and plays mandolin, guitar, fiddle, and bass with the Oregon Old-Time Fiddlers. For Nina’s publications: ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html.
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